It all circles back to family.
Hundreds of Kingsley football fans packed the high school’s gymnasium on a Friday night to celebrate the Stags’ accomplishment one more time.
That’s kind of been the theme in Kingsley the last two weeks, with windows of downtown shops plastered with signs encouraging and celebrating the Stags’ second football state championship 18 years after the first.
This team seemed destined for accomplishments, you sensed that.
From loading up the schedule — which was ranked as the toughest in Division 6 — to the amount of returning players, something seemed up.
Kingsley is a football town, there’s no doubt about that.
I remember covering a boys soccer game this fall, just down the street from Rhodes Field. On the way there and back, Rhodes was bustling with activity and a raucous crowd. Like, really loud. On a Wednesday, nonetheless.
So asking around about what was going on, folks said it was a middle school football game. Kingsley’s faithful filled the varsity field for a middle school game. That says something.
After every game, Kingsley players and fans form a giant circle on the field — the family circle. It’s a staple of Kingsley football games, win or lose.
At the semifinals in Cadillac, they had to pull a few strings to let the fans on the field after a 37-7
I was lucky enough to have covered four of those games along the way. Out of that was born my own jinx, after jokingly pointing out to coach Tim Wooer that the Stags’ convincing win over Traverse City St. Francis broke a streak of three straight losses when I attended their games (the last two Gaylord matchups, and the 2022 TCSF contest). It got brought up again after traveling to the Ogemaw Heights game for the Northern Michigan Football Conference’s Legends Division title. That didn’t go as planned for the Stags, either.
We knew Gaylord was going to be great this year, and the Stags took the Blue Devils to the limit before falling by only three points.
Maybe those setbacks were just the thing they needed to get grounded and focused on prize at the end of the season. You sure felt that Wooer thought that was the case.
Kingsley’s next sic games would be laughers, with the Stags showing right away who was going to come out on top. You can say the same for the state finals game against Almont, where the Raiders made the mistake of chanting, “Kingsley ain’t s–t! Kingsley ain’t s–t!” before the game within hearing distance of the Stags locker room. Coaches try to motivate their team any way they can, and one’s motivation chant turned into one for the other team, as if they needed anything else.
The Stags didn’t take that to their liking, and it showed on the field as Kingsley dominated the trenches and pushed Almont around for the first half, before the Raiders got their footing a bit in the second half and made it look like a game.
Eli Graves put his name in the state finals record books four times in the 38-24 victory, thanking his offensive line for each entry.
Yes, as great as Graves was this season, it truly was a team effort. The Stags showed no weakness during a playoff run in which they racked up 44.8 points per game and gave up only 88, although much of that came after games were already decided for all intents and purposes. The Kyle Smith-led defense was especially stout in the first half during the postseason, allowing the offense to put games away early.
While driving to the state finals, I made a slight detour to go through Kingsley instead of Mesick on the way. Just wanted to get a little glimpse of the opposite of that Wednesday middle school game, which was right on target. Aside from traffic passing through, it was a ghost town.
The game was on the radio, but who knows how many people actually listened. It seemed like everyone saw in Detroit, with a sea of orange regalia sprawled across Kingsley’s side of the Ford Field lower bowl.
For those that weren’t at the Dec. 1 town celebration inside the Kingsley Area Schools gymnasium, we announced Graves will be our football Player of the Year. No surprise there. The rest of the Dream Team is scheduled for a Christmas Eve announcement in the Record-Eagle.
Graves surely will thank his teammates and community for all the support along the way. After all, it’s a team game, and he doesn’t like talking about himself.
Kingsley showed how it truly takes a village. The Stags certainly backed that up.